Oil and gas production operations in new regions, such as the Arctic, have dramatically increased over the past few years. This increasing activity makes it more likely that fixed or floating production platforms, drill ships, and other structures will be used in these regions. A concern for these types of structures in such regions is potential for damage caused by ice bodies that are uncontrolled and floating in the water, such as icebergs, ice floes, and other moving ice bodies. In icy regions, for example, large icebergs and strong ice floes can pass through survey, production, and drilling areas. Although production vessels may be designed to handle some impacts from such marine obstacles, the vessels may have limits on how long impacts can be sustained and what force of potential impacts that can be handled safely.
For these reasons, operators on a production vessel or other structure will need to anticipate these obstacles so the production vessel can be sufficiently protected. If conditions become too dangerous, operators may also need to suspend operations and move the production vessel away until it is safe to return to normal operations. Being able to do so reliably can be of utmost importance to operators.
Others have developed methods for detecting and characterizing ice floes from satellite imagery (Blunt, Kumaran et al., 2012). Hall et al. (2010) describe a method for tracking ice floes from one image to the next. Blunt, Mitchell et al. (2012) describe a method for forecasting ice floe trajectories with an estimate of uncertainty. However, no solution has been proposed for a near-real-time method for tracking and forecasting the movement of marine ice bodies
Therefore, a need exists for a method for tracking and forecasting the movements of marine ice bodies.